 that count in life;
he certainly had never known one that had acted, as he might have said, with
more of a crowded rush. And the rush, though both vague and multitudinous, had
lasted a long time, protected, as it were, yet at the same time aggravated, by
the circumstance of its coinciding with a stretch of decorous silence. They
couldn't talk without disturbing the spectators in the part of the balcony just
below them; and it, for that matter, came to Strether - being a thing of the
sort that did come to him - that these were the accidents of a high
civilisation; the imposed tribute to propriety, the frequent exposure to
conditions, usually brilliant, in which relief has to await its time. Relief was
never quite near at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other such people, and
though you might be yourself not exactly one of those, you could yet, in leading
the life of high pressure, guess a little how they sometimes felt. It was truly
the life of high pressure that Strether had seemed to feel himself lead while he
sat there, close to Chad, during the long tension of the act. He was in presence
of a fact that occupied his whole mind, that occupied for the half-hour his
senses themselves all together; but he couldn't without inconvenience show
anything - which moreover might count really as luck. What he might have shown,
had he shown at all, was exactly the kind of emotion - the emotion of
bewilderment - that he had proposed to himself from the first, whatever should
occur, to show least. The phenomenon that had suddenly sat down there with him
was a phenomenon of change so complete that his imagination, which had worked so
beforehand, felt itself, in the connexion, without margin or allowance. It had
faced every contingency but that Chad should not be Chad, and this was what it
now had to face with a mere strained smile and an uncomfortable flush.
    He asked himself if, by any chance, before he should have in some way to
commit himself, he might feel his mind settled to the new vision, might
habituate it, so to speak, to the remarkable truth. But oh it was too
remarkable, the truth; for what could be more remarkable than this sharp rupture
of an identity? You could deal with a man as himself - you couldn't deal with
him as somebody else. It was a small source of peace moreover to be reduced to
wondering how little he might know in such an event what a sum he
